She said when they have forums about career vs family at college, she was surprised to see how many young women are conflicted on this point, cuz their mothers told them they must choose.
That is a really good thing to hear, because I am pregnant with a daughter right now and I've been wondering about how my choices, career-wise, will impact her outlook. And I like hearing that there are young women who look back on their mothers and appreciate the role-modeling.

I'm a lawyer and I work at a nonprofit that is generally viewed as "family friendly," but the idea of staying on there after the baby is born makes me want to sit down on the floor and cry from exhaustion (probably because I am watching another new mom go through it now). I just finished a very big year ... I argued three cases before the California Supreme Court and one before the United States Supreme Court, I had two murder appeals and a couple of other big cases, and I did so much administrative work on top of all that that I finished 2006 with about a month's work of extra billable hours in the bank. It was a great year, but it left me a complete wreck, and I really don't think I can do that with a new baby. No matter what my husband winds up doing. (He's graduating in January so we don't even know what his career situation is going to be like.)

I can quit when the baby is born, take charge of my own workload, and go into private practice working from home, which seems like a no-brainer since I can make as much money with far fewer hours billed per week, but in some ways that does feel like a cop-out, because I will not be doing anything remotely like what I have been doing lately ... I'll be doing simple cases and just getting the mortgage paid, basically. And there is a part of me that feels like maybe I should just stick with that plan for as long as my kid is little, so that I'm always at home (even though I'll have to use some part-time family daycare in order to get work done, obviously).

But then there is a much bigger part of me that really doesn't want my daughter to feel like that's her destiny, too, to be the one who gives up the career, or (God forbid) to get the idea that nothing she does matters except for raising her kids. I didn't get that message from my own mother because I saw how much happier she was when she finally went back to work when I was a teenager. She had worked when I was a baby but quit due to the really awful daycare options she had available, and she was never happy. She was a good mom, but she was a miserable housewife. And I would be a pretty miserable housewife, too. We were all better off, and we were much better parented, when Mom had an outside life that made her happy.

So I'm hoping to strike a balance, although I am also planning to take at least the first year as a break from the craziness of this last year. I can use the break, this will allow me to breastfeed, my husband could frankly probably use the break from having a stressed-out wife who's always traveling. But I don't want to take the kind of extended or total break that will set me back permanently in my career; I don't think that would be good for me or, for that matter, good for my daughter. Not in the long run.